The rest day was cold and gray.
Adrien had planned to sleep in, to let his body recover from the week's training. But by 7 AM, he was awake, staring at the ceiling, the stone cold in his palm. The tension with Johansen still gnawed at him. Not the conflict itself—he could handle that—but the way it had made him play. Forced. Desperate. Wrong.
He needed to think. Needed clarity.
The old man's building was only a ten-minute walk away.
---
Adrien hadn't visited since the night he found the photograph. That had been weeks ago—before the first assist, before the coach's trust, before the headaches and the overload. In the chaos of training and matches, he had pushed the mystery aside.
But today, he wanted answers.
He walked fast, breath fogging, hands shoved into his jacket pockets. The stone was in his right pocket, smooth and cold. He didn't know why he had brought it. Habit, maybe.
The building looked the same as before. Faded yellow paint. Cracked steps. The door to the old man's apartment—still locked, still dark behind the frosted glass.
Adrien knocked anyway.
No answer.
He knocked again, harder. The sound echoed in the stairwell, hollow and final.
---
A door opened on the floor below.
An elderly woman peered out, wrapped in a thick cardigan. She had kind eyes, the kind that had seen too many winters.
"You're the French boy, yes? The footballer?"
Adrien nodded. "I'm looking for the man who lived here. The old man."
The woman tilted her head. "Which old man?"
"The one in this apartment. I spoke to him. He helped me. He gave me—" Adrien stopped. He couldn't explain the stone. "He was here. A few weeks ago."
The woman shook her head slowly. "That apartment has been empty for months, dear. Since before winter. The landlord can't rent it—something wrong with the pipes, he says. But no one's lived there."
Adrien's chest tightened. "Are you sure?"
"I've been here twelve years. I know my neighbors." She paused, studying him. "You look pale. Are you unwell?"
"No. I just—" Adrien ran a hand through his hair. "I talked to him. He sat on the steps. He watched me train. He was real."
The woman said nothing for a long moment. Then she stepped closer, voice dropping.
"There is a story. Old-timers talk about it sometimes. A man who lived here in the nineties. A foreigner. Football, they say. He was something, once. Then one day, he was gone. No warning. No goodbye. Just... vanished."
"Did anyone remember his name?"
She shook her head. "Some say one thing, some say another. Most don't remember him at all. It's like... he was never really here." She glanced at the apartment door. "Funny thing, though. After he left, that apartment stayed cold. Not temperature cold. Just... empty. Like something had been carved out of it."
Adrien had heard those exact words before. From another neighbor. Weeks ago.
The same story. No one remembers him clearly.
He thanked the woman and walked back down the stairs.
---
Outside, the wind had picked up.
Adrien stood on the sidewalk, staring up at the old man's window. The glass was grimy, reflecting the gray sky. No movement. No light. Nothing.
He was here. I know he was here.
But the certainty felt thinner now. Like a photograph left in the sun, fading at the edges.
Adrien pulled out the stone, turned it over in his palm.
E. Ravn.
He had searched online. Found fragments—an article, a forum post, a quote. But nothing solid. Nothing that proved Elias Ravn had ever existed.
What if he didn't?
The thought chilled him more than the wind.
---
Adrien walked to the training ground instead of going home.
It was empty—the rest day meant no players, no coaches, no staff. The pitch stretched out before him, quiet and still. He stepped onto the grass, boots crunching on the frost.
He didn't have a ball. Didn't need one.
He just stood at the center circle, eyes closed, trying to feel the game the way the old man had described.
"You're looking at the ball. The ball isn't the game."
"The game shows you everything. The hard part is choosing what to ignore."
"It doesn't make you better. It just shows you what you could have been."
Adrien opened his eyes.
The field was empty. No teammates, no opponents, no noise.
But he could see it anyway. The spaces. The runs. The flow of a game that wasn't happening.
The ability is mine now. Whether he was real or not.
That was the truth. The old man had given him something—a gift, a curse, a key. But the stone was just a stone. The visions came from inside him now. From somewhere behind his eyes, somewhere deep in his perception.
I don't need to find him. I need to understand what he left behind.
---
That night, Adrien sat at his small desk, the photograph spread in front of him.
The black-and-white image. The blurred face. The winger's posture—so similar to his own.
On the back, the spidery handwriting:
E.R. — 1991. The year they tried to forget.
Adrien flipped it over again, studying the stadium in the background. The floodlights. The shape of the stands. It didn't look like any stadium he knew. Old. Forgotten. Maybe demolished.
He searched online again. Different terms this time. "1991 Ballon d'Or forgotten winner." "Missing football records." "Elias Ravn disappeared."
Nothing new. Just the same fragments. The same dead ends.
But then, on the fourth page of results, a link to a scanned newspaper. Norwegian. Dated 1995. The headline:
"Where Are They Now: The Mysterious Case of Elias Ravn"
Adrien clicked.
The scan was poor—blurry, watermarked, sections illegible. But he could make out some of it.
"... Ravn, who briefly captivated European football with his unnatural spatial awareness, retired abruptly at age twenty-six. When asked about his departure, he reportedly said: 'The game is too loud. I can't turn it off.' Since then, he has vanished from public life. Attempts to locate him have failed. Some believe he left the country. Others suspect... [text unreadable] ... no official records of his Ballon d'Or win exist in several modern databases, leading to speculation about a clerical error—or something stranger."
Adrien stared at the screen.
"I can't turn it off."
The same thing he was starting to feel. The overload. The headaches. The way the visions sometimes didn't stop when he wanted them to.
The game is too loud.
He closed the laptop, set the photograph aside, and picked up the stone.
What happened to you, Elias? Did you push too far? Did the visions consume you?
Or did you just... disappear?
---
Adrien didn't sleep well that night.
He dreamed of a stadium filled with fog. A trophy, floating above the pitch. A face that kept changing, never settling, always just out of focus.
And a voice, distant and tired:
"The rest... is what it takes from you."
He woke before dawn, the stone clenched in his fist.
Tomorrow, there was a match.
Tomorrow, he would play.
But tonight, he sat in the dark, holding a dead man's memory, wondering if he was walking the same path.